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Wednesday, April 20, 2011

It's been a while since I have updated my blog, I know, but at the club we have been caught up in the Warhammer 8th edition frenzy and so everyone has been updating their armies. So I swam with the current and spent some quality time with my Wood Elves. Now I am not a big fan of Warhammer fantasy, simply because I think the game is a skirmish battle pretending to be a wargame. The rules mechanics are fine, if not excellent for Mordheim, but fall short for mass battles. In fact we are developing a fantasy game from the Fog of War historical rules which we think are awesome. But that is another story!

Well, on the side, I started and have nearly finished an experiment I wanted to try. I have played a few games with Fenrisian wolf packs led by a Wolf Guard sergeant on a Thunder Wolf to good effect most of the time, but I was playing with proxy models. So I decided to build up some relatively cheap temporary models for this unit until GW issues us with some official models for Fenrisian packs and Thunder Wolves. Below is what I came up with.

Well, as I was looking for models to use for my Fenrisian Wolf pack I stumbled upon DJ Batman's blog. He had an article about how a guy named Franz made his fen.wolves out of the Chaos Warhounds and goblin wolf heads. here is the link below:

I liked the idea so much I decided to give the concept a shot with my own take on it. I decided to buy a box of chaos warhounds and started to search for some goblin wolf heads on the online bit stores. At first I did not have much luck until I stumbled upon four lots on Ebay selling five goblin wolf heads and tails in each lot. I bought them all.

When everything arrived I glued together the chaos warhound's bodies together and removed all the spikes, sores and scales. At this point the warhounds can pass as proxy fen.wolves, and for the less industrious of us wargamers this would be a good compromise, but I wanted them to look more wolf-like. So I cut of the top part of their heads from the jaws upwards and fitted in the goblin wolf heads. This takes further cutting and trimming of both parts, and if anyone wants to try it out, please take precautions or extra care not to hurt yourselves. The next step was to attached the goblin wolf tails. This could not be simpler. Just drill holes in the tails and the warhound's backsides; insert a metal rod (usually a piece of paperclip) for strength and glue together.

Now that the heads and tails were glued into place I started to fill in the gaps with epoxy putty to add strength and I used green stuff for some minor sculpting to smoothen things out between the head and jaws. I also wanted to add a crest of fur along the back of the warhound to connect its mane to the tail. I let everything to dry out in the summer sun for two hours until every thing was cured.

The next step is to build up the mane of the wolves with green stuff. The secret to this is something I have mentioned several times on this blog. Do it in steps! One layer - let it cure - do another layer - and so on. For the mane I used small rolls of putty tapered at one end and sculpted with a clay pusher tool with an angle chisel.

When all the models were ready, and this took me just ten hours including the time for the putty to cure in Maltese summer temperatures, I based coated the models with Astronomican Grey.

The next step now is to go on and paint the lot, but that is something for another chapter of my blog.

So until Russ wear flowers in his hair and sings kumbayah, keep playing Space Wolves!